Editorial & Visual Layouts

Standard Garden is not only for prose—it is a sanctuary for photographers, designers, and visual essayists fleeing the compression, noise, and algorithmic degradation of traditional social networks.

Here, images are treated with the same reverence as literature. The layout engine provides magazine-grade aesthetics directly from plain Markdown, without requiring raw HTML, complex styling classes, or specialized site builders.

1. Implicit Grids: Diptychs & Triptychs

You can create balanced, side-by-side gallery rows simply through natural Markdown formatting:

• Isolated Image (Single Reading Column): When an image is placed on its own paragraph, it automatically centers within the optimal reading measure of the essay.
• Diptychs and Triptychs (Side-by-Side Grid): To place two or three images together on a single horizontal row, simply write their Markdown links on consecutive lines without empty lines between them:

![Morning mist in the valley](/images/mist.jpg)
![Sunlight through the pines](/images/pines.jpg)

Automatic Height Equalization & Zero Cropping

Unlike social media platforms that force your photographs into aggressive square or 4:5 crops, Standard Garden calculates the relative aspect ratios of your images in real time:

• The heights of adjacent images are equalized mathematically across the row.
• Authentic Composition: Vertical portraits, wide horizontal landscapes, and panoramic ratios maintain their true framing without a single pixel cropped.
• Responsive Mobile Collapse: When viewed on narrow smartphone screens, the multi-column diptych smoothly reflows into a single vertical sequence to preserve visual comfort and readability.

2. Cinematic Impact: The ::hero Syntax

For major milestones, travelogues, or opening photo-essays that demand a breathtaking breath of scale, you can break images out of the standard reading column into a full-bleed presentation.

Precede any image paragraph with the ::hero directive:

::hero
![The jagged cliffs of the Atlantic coast](/images/atlantic-cliffs.jpg)

The photograph extends across the entire width of the reader’s viewport (full bleed), providing an immersive visual pause before returning gently to the typographic rhythm of your text.

3. Pacing & Screen Transitions: The ::screen Syntax

Long-form photo journals and visual stories require deliberate breathing room. You can introduce architectural screen separations using the ::screen directive:

::screen

Or encapsulate a complete screen-by-screen presentation:

::screen full
![Dawn over the bay](/images/dawn.jpg)
### Part II: The Rising Tide
::end

When readers explore your essay, pressing the Space key glides smoothly from one media element or screen separation to the next.

4. Immersive Lightbox & High-Definition Client Delivery

Standard Garden transforms your published notes into an elegant client delivery gallery, offering a human and tactile alternative to cold cloud folders like WeTransfer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.

1. Distraction-Free Lightbox

When a reader clicks or taps any photograph in your garden:

• The page background softly dims and blurs with an architectural frosted-glass overlay.
• The image renders at full resolution, allowing the viewer to appreciate delicate texture, grain, and color fidelity without interface clutter.

2. High-Resolution Download Button

For wedding photographers, architectural studios, and artists delivering commissioned work to clients or family:

• An optional, discreet download icon is integrated into the expanded lightbox view.
• Clients can effortlessly retrieve the original high-resolution master file directly from the photo-essay.
• The Experience: Delivering a creative project becomes a memorable, narrative storybook rather than an impersonal archive link.

5. Art Direction & Theme Tokens for Visuals

You can tailor the visual atmosphere of each individual gallery or note using frontmatter design tokens:

---
title: "The Silent Forest: Autumn Studies"
theme: gallery
color-light-accent: "#c25e2e"
font-header: "Playfair Display, serif"
visibility: public
publish: true
---

• gallery (The Exhibit): Minimalist, quiet typography that recedes into the background to let photographs speak with museum-grade authority.
• forest: Organic, warm botanical tones, ideal for nature photography and field journals.
• international (The Construct): Rigorous Swiss modernist grid with crisp geometric clarity, tailored for architecture and industrial design portfolios.

6. Instant Galleries: Drag & Drop Photos or Entire Folders

You don’t need to manually upload and type Markdown image links to share a series of photographs:

• Anywhere in Your Browser: Simply drag a selection of photos—or an entire local photo folder—and drop it anywhere onto standard.garden.
• Automatic Note Titling: When dropping a folder (e.g. Kyoto - Spring Morning), Standard Garden automatically adopts the folder’s name as your note title.
• Automatic Gallery Temperament: The note is instantly seeded with theme: gallery and generated with Markdown image lines on consecutive rows, giving you ready-to-publish implicit diptychs and triptychs.
• Zero Loss: Every image is safely stored on Cloudflare R2 at full camera resolution without aggressive social platform compression.

See Also

• Styling the Soil (Frontmatter & Tokens) — the full token reference
• The Obsidian Atelier — syncing images and notes from your local vault
• The Six Classical Temperaments — choosing your visual voice